Even in Refugee Camps, Women’s Work Never Done

In the early morning hours, before the visiting dignitaries come for their escorted tours, before the press arrives, before even the humanitarian aid workers get here, this camp is a woman’s world.

Using a small broom bought in one of the provision stores that have sprung up in every refugee camp in Macedonia, one woman after another begins her daily ritual--often repeated a dozen times a day--of sweeping the bare earth in front of her tent and laying anew the cardboard boxes that serve as a doormat. In the growing heat, when a scorching wind blasts for much of the day and coats everything with a fine layer of dust, the devotion to cleanliness seems a hopelessly quixotic effort.

But sweeping up is one of the few ways that women in the camps can exercise some small bit of control over their daily lives. Even with the prospect of returning to their homeland growing bright again, so much else is a shambles.

With dusk, despite all efforts, order vanishes. In the tents of recently arrived refugees, small children often vomit for days before getting accustomed to the food, and across the camp infants and toddlers cry--off and on--throughout the night, which means that the women go without sleep as they attempt to comfort their children.

Perhaps most disconcerting for many of these women, who fled from homes in small villages surrounded by fields and trees, is this nocturnal noise that is a byproduct of living in a sea of people. At this camp, the largest in Macedonia, about 30,000 refugees are all but stacked on top of one another--a city by any estimation.

“The first night I came here, I felt I was in a huge, dark cave. There was noise from every side, but I could not see anything,” said Fiza Jashari, 33, who has spent about a month in the camp.

For some women, the night brings something worse than sleeplessness. Women have begun to come forward to report that they are being physically abused by their husbands. One was knifed and another was beaten with a hammer here, according to aid workers. Many less extreme cases go unreported, aid workers believe.

“The realities for the women in the camps are harsh,” said Nancy Shalala, a spokeswoman for Catholic Relief Services, which runs one of the camps. She was visiting Cegrane to discuss with other aid workers how best to protect women from abuse.

“Most of the trauma is psychological, but in this situation, the men feel they’ve been stripped of the ability to defend their families. They perceive that they’ve failed, and some of them take it out on the women,” Shalala said.

In traditional Kosovo Albanian society, women are unaccustomed to talking about themselves, much less complaining about the conditions of life or about their treatment by their spouses. Ask them how they feel about something and most likely they will shrug and say they are managing.

But ask them about conditions for their families and suddenly they become expansive. For they are the defenders of family, the ones responsible for creating a home life.

Re-Creating Their Home Environments

Women are in the majority here. In absolute numbers, they represent 52% of the refugees, but in the 15-to-44-year-old group, they are disproportionately represented, said Monika Brulhart, a social worker with the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. This means that they bear the brunt of the physical and psychological work of taking care of the family, she said.

“In a way, every woman is trying to create the environment that they had at home. These aren’t really conditions for doing that, but we try; we feel we have to try,” said Flora Rexhepi, 28, a mother of two small children, who fled here with her immediate family.

“Everyone is sad inside, so we are doing everything we can--washing, sweeping, cooking--just to forget the past and to not think too much,” she said.

A short woman with wavy dark hair, Rexhepi sat tensely on the edge of a cot in her tent as she talked, twisting her daughter’s T-shirt in her hands. She is teaching English to primary school students in the camp, as she did at home, and like many of the women here, she keeps her tent immaculate. She spends an hour and a half each morning airing the nine heavy woolen military blankets that serve as covers and rugs, hanging them on the chicken wire fencing that encloses the camp.

For most of the women in most of the camps, the most humiliating aspect of life is the lack of adequate bathrooms. But the most exhausting is the lack of a kitchen and washing facilities. Women here typically spend many hours of every day literally on their knees--scrubbing pots, washing clothes, making up their tents.

“The hygienic conditions are terrible,” said Myrvete Mehmeti, 23, who came to Cegrane from a small town in southern Kosovo, a separatist province of Serbia, the dominant republic in Yugoslavia. Mehmeti is living in a 10-by-10 tent with her sister, her brother and his wife and five children.

“It’s not so bad for the children, because we can wash them in the tap, but for a woman there is nowhere to go.”

The women do not want to undress at the outdoor communal tap, she said, and there are no showers at the camp.

Fruitless Search for a Bathtub

“We have gone down to the village and knocked on people’s doors and begged them to let us take a bath. But there are so many refugees staying with families there that they just slam the door. It’s humiliating to have to ask a stranger for such a thing,” she said.

It had been weeks since anyone in the small town a few hundred yards from the camp would let them use a bathtub, she said.

The situation is perhaps even worse for Bedrije Vashani, an unemployed factory worker who received unemployment assistance before she came here but brought no savings and has no relatives in foreign countries to send her cash.

When she went down to the town of Cegrane to beg townspeople to let her take a bath, they charged her 2 German marks--about $1. She has taken three baths in five weeks and has no money for a fourth.

Although it is nearly summer, she was wearing a heavy wool sweater, which has begun to smell of dried perspiration, but which she said she has no choice but to keep wearing because she cannot afford to buy a summer shirt.

For all the women at the camp, doing laundry is a backbreaking task that first involves hauling water in buckets or in large plastic jugs from a communal tap, often hundreds of feet from their tents.

The only way to heat the water is to leave it sitting in the sun. Then it is poured into plastic tubs, soap is added, and the women kneel on the ground, scrubbing each item of clothing. New water must be added, sometimes two or three times, to wash out the soap, and then the whole process is repeated for the next batch of clothes.

Still, doctors and social workers say that, overall, the women are in better shape psychologically than the men. That is due in large part to the amount of time they spend working.

“Most of the time, you’ll see the men sitting in the tents--smoking, brooding--and that leads to depression,” said Visar Nushi, a doctor from Kosovo who works with Doctors of the World.

Crucial to the women’s psychological health seems to be their ability to feel that they are successfully creating a home. Nowhere does this seem truer than at Senekos, one of the smaller camps, which is operated by Mercy Corps International. Its claim to fame is that it has field kitchens, run by the refugees, that serve one hot meal a day to every person in the camp. That task gives back to the Kosovo Albanian women a central role in family life--that of the cook, the provider of food.

The Therapy of Cooking

On a recent morning, the kitchens, which are no more than large tents with massive stoves and cutting boards, were full of women and men who were cooking enormous vats of cabbage seasoned with onions, tomatoes and meat. Each of the kitchens makes enough for 530 people, according to the cooks.

“When I first came here, I missed cooking a lot, because I was used to doing it in my home for my family, my parents, my cousins. It is our tradition to eat a hot meal together in our home every day,” said Bahrije Baftiu, 42, a lively woman with muscular arms who kept tossing her bangs away from her eyes as she struggled to stir the stew.

“Now this is our home, and we are trying to create a lot of the things that we had in Kosovo,” she said. “This is our garden, although we have no grass.”